Club PA Newsletter #75 (Patreon)

There were, like… six hundred and thirty people watching one of these League things, which for our little channel is kinda crazy outside a special event.  Most of what we do on there is pretty intimate; it doesn't reach out into the larger Twitch community which is why it's so chill in there.  We use Twitch like Public Access TV, which I'm not sure is a meaningful term anymore, but if somebody who works here has an idea about what to do, they can do it.  The only rule is that they really have to want to.  That goes all the way up to Mike, who finds streaming from the studio proper very intimidating but streams, like, seven times a week from home…?

Huh.

Whatever it might say in the strip, outside of a (joke) rivalry he has with Angus, Mike is… surprisingly couth on the track.  This is something that the simulation platform we use - iRacing - rigorously governs.  This is a genuinely strange product.  In one way, it's a subscription racing "service" where you shell out real money for individual cars and tracks.  It's the sort of thing that in the traditional gaming space would be rhetorically dismantled for its practices.  It's also a community, with a schedule of races in every conceivable format, scheduled all day to congregate the community where it can find useful expression.  But it's also an RPG, where your Safety Rating - assessed on every turn - is functionally the XP that levels you up to more sophisticated content.

I just finished writing this at 1:20pm PDT; school took up the better part of the day.  Now I'm gonna go finish up the newspost proper.  According to the Seattle Times, yesterday was the first day free of deaths from COVID-19 in Washington State.  It's a milestone we've been waiting three months for.  I've never felt so thankful toward a graph.