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.

I always hoped my mid-life crisis would be relatively mild.

Since Tycho is still out of town, I’ll be handling the Friday afternoon stream solo. I’ll be checking out the new “My Team” mode in F1 2020 from 2-4pt over on Twitch. I have not investigated this mode yet but from what I understand it’s a mode that allows you to create a brand new F1 team and race alongside the real teams like Mercedes and Ferrari. Just like Motorsport Manager, we will be designing a team, handling staff, upgrading our facilities and managing the cash flow. Unlike Motorsport Manager, when it’s time to hit the track I’ll be the one driving the car. We will be learning this mode together so come hang out and help me figure it out this afternoon. 

In my ongoing efforts to understand what in the fuck streamers are talking about, I occasionally disappear down this or that rabbit hole regarding auto aim or crossplay or bots or some other thing in Fortnite. I tend to emerge from these rhetorical thickets dumber than I was when I climbed in. So I don't know exactly what Gabriel is experiencing in the Switch fork of Fortnite, and it might not matter very much, but there's a case to be made that purely as a user experience BR games should throw you a bone every now and then.

Fallout might be the perfect setting to grab if you wanted to make something that could truly cross over into the world where normal people lurk and throb. The overarching framework - a war of annihilation with China, an attenuated cultural inheritance everyone understands at cross purposes, and a tangle of subterranean nests running cultural experiments - has real fucking meat. I understand some of the scorpions are also quite large, so there's really something for everybody here. Plus, somebody already made one, and it was good. So we know it's possible.

I’ll be doing a rare afternoon racing stream today. My friend Jerry (Tycho Brahe) is still out of town but I will not be spotterless. My son Gabe has agreed to join me on the stream today and I am hoping he has internalized the lessons from last night. 

Even to newly hatched larva still trailing the strips of their casing, "Formula 1" is probably an understood term. It truns out there's a bunch of Formulas, though, and in aggregate they create the fraught competitive pathway to the apex of the sport. Then there's Formula E, which... I mean, it might be best to watch Hulu's "And We Go Green."

I fell off of TikTok even before the reports everyone has been talking about, the one which claimed to reveal a host of sins baked into the software at a philosophical level. I've also read other smart people talking about how it's not as bad as it sounds. I'd say that's more or less typical of engineers, who are always trying to climb atop one another for a primacy so granular it's not even visible to those outside the cloister. The engineer I trust most works here, and he doesn't trust shit, and suggests that you have to start with that it's possible for code to do, which is "anything." But let us, as a body comprised mostly of laypeople, say that, you know, hey. The fact that we don't know these things makes us delicious and inviting prey. And if we spent five minutes today thinking about the fact that we are completely bound by these devices, and people have found a way to monetize our every anxious twitch, every bead of terror sweat that falls from our knotted brow onto the touchscreen, and we're not really conscious of the mechanisms behind this, it must be considered "good."

The Penny Arcade iRacing league continues to grow. We’ve got just over 120 drivers now and our weekly races have been packed. Each week it’s a different car to race and so far the selections have been really fun. Last week we raced the Mazda MX-5 at Lime Rock which I was actually sort of familiar with. 

So many of the books that were formative to me I found via Videogames, which I feel like is pretty odd. Shit, maybe all of them - all the ones I still think about are either from a videogame directly, or were just downstream from the books they revealed.

Kinda speaks for itself, I think. Tell your friends:

I need new books. I was reading a book Kate Welch/Rosie Beestinger/Yitzbin Attende handed over at PAX East called Children Of Time, which is fucking rad, and then I read the sequel "Children Of Ruin," which wasn't as good, but let me hang out in that world a little bit longer.