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.

Clubhouse Games on the Switch is probably the polar opposite of The Last of Us 2. As in, like, exactly across from it on the diagram. It's clean. It's gentle, and life affirming. It's friendly. It believes that we can improve ourselves by moving very small things around in specific ways. And it does so with a breathtaking grace.

The kids are on summer break now which brings and end to about three months of home schooling. I can't even begin to imagine the long term damage my "teaching" has done.  Now, I’m playing lots of great games and reading some really good books so I thought I’d share. 

I couldn't watch the streams for very long. There was a lot of pain in them. Not sure how many people are gonna take Facebook up on their offer of safe harbor; I'm pretty sure I saw people streaming the Twitch account creation process live on Mixer. Here was Grob's take:

I think I would like to see Naughty Dog's Seattle; it was cool to see what they did with the place in inFAMOUS. The Playstation is the platform you go to for dire visions of the city I live in, apparently. But I honestly can't think of anything I need less than The Last Of Us 2 right now. I see trailers and clips and shit and it's a lot of wet sounds and incredibly intimate knife violence. No. Just, fuckin'... no.

Brenna always asks me what I want to do for Father's Day, and the answer is always "nothing." Not because I want to sit, wholly inert, in some kind of Sith meditation chamber, but because I spend most days hyperventilating deep in the gulf between my potential and my manifested actions. So I'm gonna do the sorts of things I usually do, the only difference is I'm not going to feel bad the whole time.

It's all true! Well, I guess it depends on what you're asking. It's not true that a lobster can become president. But if you're asking if PAX is going Online this year, something like a… PAX Online, well, that's all true. And you already have a ticket! Nice; those can be hard to get.