Pokemon Legends: Arceus hits on the 28th, which means it's time to ritually cleanse our decrepit equipment and prepare ourselves mentally, physically, and spiritually. It's such a whacked out interpretation of the series I genuinely wonder how people are gonna take it. On the one hand, it's hard to imagine a lightning mouse as controversial. On the other, people have played these games their whole life and the developer appears to have made Breath of the Wild. I'm just saying, there's sides to this thing.

This Boba Fett show can't figure its shit out. First episode, show hadn't started yet. Second episode, okay, now I sorta get it and I like it even if the end was kinda abrupt. I feel like if you end the show during a flashback it's a little disorienting, but whatever. This third episode was like the first two put together - really cool stuff, some nostalgia, commingled with truly bizarre decisions I'm still trying to puzzle out.

I was reading about the TV Meta, where millionaires watch television shows on stream and then get banned, and it sounded like a lifestyle I wanted to be a part of - so I consulted with an artist friend of mine about what it would take to get that shit poppin' in our neck of the woods. It's not impossible, but it's also not super possible either. We could do it, but he would have to draw twenty-four hours a day for over a year. By that time, hopefully the meta will switch to artists livestreaming themselves killing their writers because we will be well positioned to take advantage of it.

It's absolutely true that there is still an Xbox 360 with a Kinect hooked up in the living room. How else do you expect me to watch my Two Towers Director's Cut on DVD? Hang on, I gotta change the disc.

The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett was fine, but - like The Mandalorian - the first two episodes combine into the Actual Thing and now I'm in. This is pretty fun. It also seems like the people making it think Star Wars is kind of cool and don't feel ashamed of that, but they aren't so enthralled by it that they won't explore the margins of it and contribute. Dream job shit.

We had hit a point with the first versions of Valheim where we'd done a bunch of cool stuff, but monsters were always pecking at it because it was live 24/7 and this was before we had Wards. There's sort of an upper bound on how many times you want to come back to a pile of crafting materials instead of a house.

That is, in fact, why I mentioned Wordle - because I thought he would be good at it. I didn't know he was even into this kind of shit, since it is generally considered my purview, but… maybe that's why he never told me. He got very cagey about it when I sent him the link, and then never revealed his performance, which would bolster the original theory. But I'm actually super bad at word games!

Just for comparison's sake, if we're talking about lists:

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!