Last Friday, I suggested that I’d be heading over to Gabe’s house to check out his new obsession with Motorsport Manager, the Playsport Games developed/Sega published slab of autoerotica. I did go over. And it ended up being way, way more interesting than I expected. What I expected was “zero interesting” and what I got was a deep, dark time hole with no bottom.

Most of the “motorsport” I’m familiar with is the sort that takes place in a giant mud pit; it is a place where a monster truck flips completely over and you can secure a fully-loaded nacho for as little as two dollars. It’s essentially the WWE of racing. What I saw at Mike’s house, what was meticulously simulated in front of me on so many axes, was this tiny little world we could poke and prod and adjust. And yeah, obviously the things this world thinks it’s important so simulate fit within a fairly narrow range, but that range is fully goosed at a level of resolution that is akin to worship. The world of “motorsport” as detailed here, in the categories they’ve chosen to define, is an intensely complex, interdisciplinary Team Sport of breathtaking sophistication that only very rarely involves cars on tracks. It’s a startlingly intimate game for something that seems so abstract to the outsider - we’re making changes to the car, and planning changes to the car, every lap of a race; changes the driver can feel. And we spent the previous months working on a part that wasn’t ready yet, one that should really give us an edge - perhaps more of an edge than is strictly race legal. We’re gonna play again on Friday afternoon at 2pm PST if you want to see what I mean.

We’ve gone remote for our Wednesday D&D Stream, so we’ll see you for Acquisitions Incorporated: The “C” Team tonight on Twitch for what should be a deeply strange, Kafka-by-way-of-Monty-Python adventure. The new “C” Team - designated “Collections” on internal documents - has just established their cover business, a Business where the party’s bard Prism performs Covers. Their base of operations is an only slightly burned inn they have dubbed The Sunbeam Parlour, formerly known as the Friend Hole. And that’s only where we start. Come see us at 4pm PST at twitch.tv/pennyarcade.

I don’t really stream from home, and it requires things of me that I don’t have in my brain. My current challenge here in the house is to get the correct kind of light on my face so I don’t look like a fifty-fifty admixture of ghost and grub on stream. I gave up last night; ultimately I may have to lean into “luminous worm” as an overall identity.

(CW)TB out.