It seems like every day, a different part of an airplane - one I haven't really heard of before, a flange or manifold - shears off a plane and falls on cars in the parking lot. It's entirely possible that these aren't even especially important pieces! Friends, the "woggler" may not even be responsible for keeping the plane airborne. That said, purely as a rhetorical excursion, I would like it to remain firmly attached to the plane. Is that a reasonable request? Is there a place I can file that?

There are some great deals on Need for Speed games during the Steam Spring sale. They are all either 90% or 95% off! If you’re looking for some arcade racing action there are some great options here. I’ll share the ones I’ve been playing lately. 

I have a lot of The Crow trivia that is very powerful and must be deployed with all haste. Did you know that, for example, my wife Brenna was able to secure the Brandon Bruce Lee Scholarship at Whitman College? Huh? Didja? Now… did you know that The Crow: City Of Angels is the only movie I have ever walked out of? I was watching it with Mork. It was VERY BAD. I guess this is all technically Me trivia. But, as someone who was in my last year of High School when the first Crow came out - and thus almost cosmically situated to observe the phenomena - I don't have a problem with the new trailer.

Playing Sid Meier's Civilization on David Lishner's 386, I think I couldn't have imagined a couple things. One, that there would eventually be six of these motherfuckers. You don't really understand how time works when you are a larva, and what's more, it would be several additional years before I stopped believing in the rapture.

Playing games like Monopoly or in our case Civilization VI with your kids really gives you a fun glimpse into their personalities and can introduce great opportunities to teach some real life lessons. Monopoly can teach them about the realities of paying rent and managing your money while Civ can teach them how to dominate the world through brutal nuclear war. 

I saw this Business Insider article titled “The 8 people who made Dungeons & Dragons cool just launched their answer to the game. Hasbro and its game empire should be very, very nervous.” and then I remembered back in 2016 when Acquisitions Incorporated played D&D in the Benaroya Symphony Hall and it was a Fathom Event you could watch live in over 300 movie theaters across the country. That was pretty cool. 

-Gabe Out

This Dean Takahashi interview with Chris Cocks is a wild ride. The thing about Hasbro that is so confusing is that they're obviously doing what they're supposed to do according to the strange laws that exist at their scale. I don't mean to say that these laws comport with anything we would recognize aesthetically or ethically. I mean that we can see the springs and gears move and understand precisely why they're doing the things they are. Waist deep in muck, it can be hard to remember. But we aren't the audience for this article, and the clientele for kaiju-tier megafauna aren't "people" in the traditional sense, but capital markets.

The latest update to iRacing has got me back behind the virtual wheel. I did a quick test last night to make sure all my equipment worked for streaming and not only did it all work, but I got second place in the race! 

We've talked about iRacing a lot, a fascination that coalesced during "the pando." Mork's obsession with fast car - spurred originally by the release of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" in 1998 - found new and startling manifestations in 2020. We went so far as to found a pretend motorsports company - technically, a second time.

If you started reading Penny Arcade back in the before times, you might remember I asked my then girlfriend to marry me in comic form. Sometimes it can be strange having what is in many ways my diary online for so long. This is one of the events I’m glad to have immortalized and today Kara and I celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary! 

We messed around with Funcom's Conan Exiles for the "length" of time many did - to see how these twisted Swedes had embroidered a physics operative human phallus. However much space it might have taken up in the budget, their proprietary dongsim must certainly have paid itself back in earned media. I thought it was cool but the style of game it is means I'd have to get a bunch of people to join me, plus it is very scary. But… I don't know. This Dune variant of Funcom's "thing" - a "thing" they've been conceiving and building upon for decades - might bring me around. Especially with that Collector's Edition. Yowza!

Gabe’s Sticker shoppe has been updated and you can now travel back to the 1980’s when stickers ruled!

Steam will allow you to curate certain portions of your library into the ether, either at time of purchase or later. It's also incredibly easy to do: you just right click on a game in your library, choose the Manage item from the dropdown, and choose Mark As Private. You can even do it with a shift-click group select, and do many, many games at once - a fact I mention just off-hand, for absolutely no reason, and not because it has any particular salience to my own intensely pure situation.

The iRacing servers are taking a beating with everyone anxious to try out the new update but I managed to get some laps in and all I can say is “WOW”. Rain or "The great equalizer" has finally come to iRacing and it was worth the wait!

This week will see the next phase of my grand sticker plans unfold. The official Penny Arcade sticker Album will hit the PA store along with some new sticker designs on March 7th!

Gabe hadn't read Shogun, which ordinarily I would use as an opportunity to scourge him from a profound intellectual height. Something more like the opposite has happened - I envy this ignorance of the text. I wish to Gord I could read it anew.  Shogun is almost twelve hundred pages, and our affair was torrid. I couldn't leave it well enough alone. A visual note: it was a borrowed copy from Brenna's dad, before she and I agreed to be married, and because it was a paperback it could barely hold itself together. By the time it fell into my hands, it had essentially split itself into two books of a digestible six hundred pages apiece.