A Eulogy for Xanadu Games

On December 31st, 2024, the greatest local venue in American Super Smash Bros. will close its doors.

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Perhaps I’m biased, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to give Xanadu Games that designation. For more than a decade, it’s been one of the premier tournament locations on the east coast.

Alongside VGBootCamp — the organization behind the event — Xanadu can be credited with kickstarting competitive Smash’s streaming presence on Twitch and YouTube, thus laying the groundwork for the internationally-spectated phenomenon the series has become today. Between its two locations, the “Smash @ Xanadu” weekly series has probably played host to more Smash tournaments than any other single event, and that’s without even mentioning the two other weeklies, countless regionals, multiple majors, and events for other fighting games that have taken place there.

Someone should write an in-depth article explaining the history of VGBootCamp and the Xanadu local, one that delves into the path that led them to become cornerstones of the Smash community. I’d read the hell out of that article.

This will not be that article. I can’t be the one who writes it.

I wasn’t a Xanadu regular for very long in the grand scheme of things, but it just means too much to me to look at it in an unbiased way. It would be like trying to write a comprehensive history of your own bedroom.

I want to tell a different story. The truth is that Xanadu, despite its legendary status, is so goddamn weird. It has always been weird. It is special and unique and strange in ways that most people do not see. When people remember Xanadu, I want them to remember that too.

I.

My journey with Xanadu began in the same place that it did for almost everyone else: right at the top of the YouTube search results.

As far as competitive Smash Bros. goes, VGBootCamp was essentially the first organization to figure out search engine optimization for tournament streams and videos. By providing Twitch live streams for every weekly event and uploading VODs of every single set to the YouTube channel in a timely manner with consistent titles and thumbnails, the team made sure that tournament sets from Xanadu were easy to find and view. It also made it more and more likely that certain sets would be picked up by the algorithm and be viewed by a lot of people. This especially held true during the Smash 4 era in the mid-2010s, when Xanadu VODs became some ofthe most consistently popular tournament content on the internet, despite the fact that the sets were from local events rather than majors.

Picture me, a middle schooler with a 3DS trying to figure out how to play Smash. I wanted to play Greninja, so I typed “smash 4 greninja” into the YouTube search bar to find tournament sets. Every time I looked this up, the second and third results were the world’s actual best Greninja players at the time like iStudying and Somé, and the first result was always local Greninja player Techei fighting for his life in Winners Round 3 of some random Xanadu weekly.

In fact, just out of curiosity, I looked up “smash 4 Greninja”, and the vast majority of non-Ultimate results were still Techei sets from Xanadu, like this one.

At the time of writing, this set has more views than Tarik vs. MuteAce at Super Smash Con 2023, a top 32 set at one of the largest Ultimate tournaments of its year, featuring two of the best and most popular representatives of their respective characters. That’s how hard these VGBC VODs got pushed to viewers. It was by watching them that many players of my generation were first introduced to this scene we continue to lov.

[embed]I love reading the replies and quotes to this tweet. So many people are basically telling the same story.

I lived in New England at the time, and yet I knew so much more about Xanadu than I did about any of my local venues. It would be years until I could tell you which top players were the best in my own region, but I knew the MD/VA Power Rankings like the back of my hand, and I could probably name twenty more Xanadu regulars who weren’t even on it. It’s hard to overstate just how iconic this random local was, purely because of how effectively it was broadcast to the world.

II.

Unfortunately, the popularity of these tournaments on a national level was a double edged sword. Since the level of competition didn’t really match up to how much visibility they got, it left the door wide open for opportunists looking for a quick buck and/or some attention to take advantage. There’s perhaps no better example of this than Boss.

This is his ssbwiki profile pic.

I thought Boss was the best Smash 4 Luigi player in the world. So did everyone else.

Early in the Smash 4 era, Boss won Xanadu 28 times, by far the most of anyone at the time. Because Xanadu VODs were so popular online, a lot of people watched his sets. Here’s one with ninety-five thousand views.

Oh hey, it’s Pink Fresh! Cool guy. He loses this set, though.

Boss had so much visibility for winning Xanadu that a lot of people just assumed he was the best Luigi player. Of course, his secret was twofold: a) winning Xanadu wasn’t that hard at the time, and b) if a tournament did seem like it was going to be hard to win, he simply wouldn’t go.

Let’s be clear: Boss was very honest about the fact that he was a notorious dodger. It’s unsourced (and I can’t personally find any record of him saying this), but his ssbwiki page claims that he openly considered himself a “businessman” rather than a competitor. Everyone from MD/VA knew that if Boss didn’t think he could turn a profit from the prize money, he wouldn’t show up. The problem is that I wasn’t from MD/VA, and I just saw him beating everyone over and over again, so I had no way of knowing this was the case.

[embed]Sure, Boss.

Inevitably, the competition in MD/VA started to catch up to Boss. When he couldn’t consistently win Xanadu anymore, he started focusing on his side hustle, a Northern Virginia local called The Cave. When he couldn’t win The Cave anymore either, he just stopped showing up entirely.

Today, for a lot of people who watched Smash back then but didn’t live in MD/VA, Boss exists as a sort of collective hallucination, a guy who everyone remembers being good but then disappeared from the public eye. He’s probably got more of a legacy than guys who were actually nationally ranked around the same time.

Like, did you know “Tearbear” was on the first PGR? Or “Cacogen”? Did you know “SlayerZ” was ranked top 30 in the world? I know who those players are, but that’s just because I’m a dork. Even then, I know a lot more about Boss.

[embed]It’s honestly very self-aware of him to shout out GimR and Aposl, the brothers behind the VGBootCamp operation.

I don’t want to sound too positive about the guy. A few years ago, a post came out revealing that winning tournaments wasn’t his only way to make money at Smash events; stealing was another option he wasn’t afraid to try.

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My impression is that this was basically the worst kept secret in the world. Oh well. Never meet your heroes. Better yet, don’t let your heroes be Smash players.

III.

The Xanadu I got to attend in person is not the one described in the prior sections. In 2018, Xanadu Games moved from their initial location in Halethorpe, MD to a new venue in Laurel. That venue was the Laurel Park horse racetrack.

Laurel Park is a historic horse racing venue that’s been operating for over 100 years. Horses you’ve probably heard of like Secretariat and Seabiscuit raced there back in the day. It’s a site famous for a sport we associate with rich old people. That means it’s kind of weird to put a tournament venue for gamers primarily in their twenties and late teens in the same building, right?

Walking into Laurel Park for the first time is a fascinating experience. You walk past the entrance pictured above and reach an intersection.

If you go right, you’ll enter a massive horse racing venue; on weeknights it usually lies empty, but if you’re there for a weekend regional or major it’ll often be full of people there to bet on the races. Even when there’s no race happening at the Laurel park track itself, hundreds of people converge to watch other races on huge screens and bet exorbitant sums of money on the results.

If you go left, you’ll be led to a door marked with an out-of-place neon sign.

It feels like wandering into a pocket dimension.

The whole thing is a hell of a contrast. Two worlds, one ancient and wealthy and dying, the other young and grassroots and full of life, stapled together in the same building.

In the enduring words of WhyDo:

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This clash of generations has led to some pretty funny events. Central to the Laurel Park Xanadu lore is the story of this guy:

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Lime suit gramps over here was tired after a long day of betting on horse races and decided to check out the Xanadu room on a whim. After realizing there was a competition happening, he apparently walked up to a Diddy Kong vs. Bowser set that was going on and immediately bet a sizable sum of money (allegedly $200, but I can’t verify that number) that the Bowser player would win.

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When faced with a new situation, we tend to just do what we know best. And you know what? In this case, it wasn’t entirely incompatible.

Gramps didn’t win the bet. I reckon he was happy anyway.

IV.

I moved to MD/VA for college in late 2021, and I stayed there during the school years until my graduation this past spring. In my time there, I became a frequent attendee of Smash Ultimate locals at Xanadu Games — usually The Grind Fridays and weekend regionals, but often the flagship Tuesday local as well.

I’m not much of a competitive player, but it turns out I’m pretty good at talking about the game. Xanadu has great production value and an easy-to-use commentary desk that’s open during locals, plus it’s home to a bunch of excellent and experienced casters, which makes it just about the best place in the world to learn how to commentate Smash. I picked it up pretty quickly, and I mostly attribute that to the fact that I got to cast with major-level guys like Nerf, Skabs, and Jdawg every single week.

One of your most important jobs as a commentator is to identify the storyline of a set or a tournament. If you can’t tell me why I should care, then I’m probably not going to care. I grew up listening to the way TKBreezy, EE, and Coney commanded the mic at Xanadu weeklies back in the day, and while most people focus on their comedy when discussing that era of their careers, I don’t think I would’ve been anywhere near as invested without their ability to pick out the story within each match.

My time at Xanadu was dominated by one storyline that crushed just about everything else in its wake: ZD vs. Dexter.

…etc.

I can’t verify this statistic, but I think ZD and Dexter have played each other in a tournament setting more than anyone else in the world. Smashers.app says they’ve played 195 sets of Smash Ultimate against each other, of which ZD has won 133 — I know for a fact this is undercounting the real total.

ZD and Dexter faced off a lot in Smash 4 too — tournament data is a little harder to find for that game, but I was able to dig up 42 YouTube VODs in which they played. Once again, there’s definitely more out there.

Between the two games, we can confirm the existence of 237 total sets between the two. I would estimate the real number is closer to 270, and that’s without even taking into account side events like Squad Strike which inflate the total even further.

Even if we take 237 as the face-value set count, it’s still a staggering number. Here’s a fun statistic to compare it to: Carmelo, the Steve main ranked 30th in the world on the LumiRank for the first half of 2024, has played 181 recorded offline sets total. Even if you only consider Ultimate, ZD and Dexter have played more offline bracket sets of against each other than the current 30th best player in the world has played against anyone, at all, ever. That’s ridiculous.

Commentating the final bracket of a Xanadu Games weekly, as I often did, usually meant desperately having to find something new to say about a ZD vs. Dexter set. It was an impossible task.

Let me try and explain who these guys are. It’s easy to start with ZD, the Fox/Wolf player who gained a reputation for his endless bracket grinding. Up until temporary-ban-induced retirement in 2023, ZD was known for going to as many locals as possible (and winning most of them).

He was pretty much the Boss of the Ultimate era, but with less stealing and more throwing controllers when he lost. He also wasn’t afraid to enter tournaments he was unlikely to win, and that was to his benefit — he defended the region from top-level invaders pretty consistently.

It was not difficult to accidentally (or sometimes intentionally) find yourself having some sort of beef with ZD. He had a lot of very strong opinions on things, and it was an easy trap to fall into.

Whether you liked it or not, this was ZD’s venue. These were his halls. He’d always get his win eventually, and when he did, there was always plenty of trash to talk.

Dexter, meanwhile, found his role as the ice to ZD’s fire, both in playstyle and personality. Dexter’s calling card has always been his impenetrable defensive play, which makes him incredibly difficult to upset for up-and-coming players who haven’t figured it out yet. He doesn’t compete super consistently anymore, but he’s still around.

The easiest way to beat Dexter has always been to let him beat himself. He’s a great player, but the tradeoff is that he’s infamous for SD’ing at the worst possible times.

For example, my first time casting a ZD vs. Dexter set was a five-game Winners Finals set followed by a thrilling ten-game Grand Finals, in which both players made countless hype plays. Then it ended like this.

[embed]- YouTube Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on…youtube.com

Lots of their sets ended this way. I frankly don’t have it in me to figure out what percentage of their matches ended with Dexter throwing himself into the blast zone for no reason, but I fear it would be a completely unreasonable number.

If you watch enough ZD vs. Dexter sets, you’ll notice that every single game takes place on the stage Pokemon Stadium 2. This is simply a consequence of how often they played — I’d imagine competing against the same dude hundreds of times would make you lose your appetite for frivolous things like counterpicks. Eventually, the two agreed (implicitly or explicitly, I’m not sure) to just run it back to their favorite stage every time.

On October 29th, 2019, Dexter counterpicked Kalos Pokemon League against ZD at a Xanadu regional called The Last Launch. As far as I can tell, that’s the last time they played on a stage other than PS2. In the subsequent four years until ZD’s retirement, I haven’t been able to find a single game they played anywhere else.

Seven years (with one-and-a-half of them lost to the pandemic). Two different Smash games. At least twenty different characters. At least 237 sets. I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it.

V.

I do want to speak a little more in-depth on commentary at Xanadu, because I think it’s one of the things that has historically set the locals hosted there apart.

As mentioned before, TK, EE, and Coney all got their starts casting Xanadu events. You could argue this was a case of being in the right place at the right time — in the early to mid 2010s, this was one of the few consistently streamed locals with a good commentary setup, so their clips got a lot of exposure compared to everyone else. When it came time to hire for major tournaments, tournament organizers looked to guys they had a lot of footage of and knew would provide a good service. The fact that they were also incredibly talented was the cherry on top.

When you look at guys who have commentated out-of-region Ultimate supermajors in the modern era, I think it would be pretty difficult to find another local venue that has seen at least seven of them as regulars. There’s the aforementioned three, then you can add Logic and Jdawg going back to that early Xanadu era, and these days you’ve also got Nerf and Skabs (who has also been the commentary manager for events like Supernova) to that list. Once NickDistrict14 inevitably starts getting the blocks he deserves, you can make it eight. I also feel like I’ve definitely forgotten a couple names here, so please don’t get mad at me if I did.

This means that for pretty much its entire history, you’ve been able to tune in to Xanadu and hear consistent high-quality commentary from a wide variety of sources, a privilege that few locals have. It’s where I got my start, and I was able to carry that experience into some blocks at big out-of-state regionals, mostly because it looks really good to have Xanadu clips in your reel.

But I want to give a shoutout to the countless local guys who have made the Xanadu commentary desk their home. I think a lot of those guys are way better than I am, they just have real jobs or less interest in getting up on that big stage. If they were in a good position to grind for it, they could absolutely get the same opportunities I did. Plus, I’ve just caught wind that a couple guys who have been putting in the work over the past couple years are about to get a showcase at a huge upcoming event, and I couldn’t be prouder.

There’s one guy I’m definitely gonna miss on the Xanadu mic (because I don’t think I ever really heard him anywhere else), and that’s Poe.

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I have never heard a commentator like Poe. The delivery of this line is absolutely perfect.

If you’ve never worked with Poe, you’re not gonna know what to do at first. Just listen to the guy trying to commentate with him in the above clip. He has no idea how to approach this situation. No other commentator has ever asked him a question like that, and no other commentator ever will.

I didn’t know what to do my first time casting with Poe, either. I think I eventually got the hang of it, but to this day I’m not really sure.

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I think the phrase “he tells it like it is” often gets misused as a weird dog whistle for genuine hatefulness these days, but that’s not the way I mean it here. Poe genuinely tells it like it is, every single time, and I could not respect it more.

VI.

Unfortunately, Xanadu’s unique location at the Laurel Park racetrack also ended up being its downfall.

Horse racing is an antiquated sport, one that I probably know more about than most people my age, and that’s solely because of my relationship to Laurel Park. There’s just not much of a market for this stuff anymore, and the numbers reflect that reality: from 1989 to 2022, the number of American horse races plummeted from over 74,000 to around 33,000.

There’s been a lot of fear-mongering these past couple years about the impending death of the Smash community, but I think it’s pretty unfounded when you look at the actual numbers. If you want to see what a sport looks like when it’s on the path to extinction, look no further than horse racing.

Photo from CBS Baltimore.

Part of that decline surely just comes from the sport’s general old-timey-ness, but its barbarism is undoubtedly a factor as well. Horse racing is incredibly dangerous for the animals themselves: The Jockey Club reports that 7,062 horses died at American race tracks from 2007 to 2022.

Laurel Park is a pretty big contributor to that number. Since 2014, more than 277 horses have been killed at just this one venue. The Maryland Horse Racing Commission responded to this staggering number by temporarily shutting all races down in April 2023, citing poor track conditions as the primary culprit. Suddenly, one of the premier horse racing locations on the east coast stood completely still.

This is the moment I first started feeling like Xanadu Games might be in trouble, and I’ve been following the situation ever since. I’ll spare you the details (I’ve learned much, much more than anyone in their early 20s should know about this godforsaken sport’s governance in the state of Maryland specifically), but the important part is this: a year after Laurel Park’s initial shutdown, the Maryland state government ruled on its future.

Photo by John Rydell.

Since April 2024, Laurel Park has had a clear expiration date. It is to serve as the primary location for Maryland horse racing until the end of 2026, at which point it will close forever and be demolished. Those years will be spent renovating the nearby Pimlico race track, and after Laurel Park’s closure, all of its racing operations will transfer over there.

Nobody in this equation is actually concerned with the death of these horses, or the way that their entire sport is built on breeding animals for their own destruction. The problem is that this destruction is starting to hurt profits, so something needs to be done about it. The “something” they went with is essentially just moving all the problems somewhere else.

I figured this plan meant Xanadu would be okay for the next couple of years, but closing down an operation like this is a long process. It means getting some things out of the way early so you don’t have to worry about them down the line, and it looks like that’s what Laurel Park’s ownership has elected to do with Xanadu Games.

And thus, we lose an iconic space that was important to so many, solely because it was caught in the death throes of a fading empire. The vibrant community that found its home there is reduced to a footnote in the eyes of the powers-that-be, a mistake in the unforgiving equation of capitalism that needs to be erased.

I want to live outside of the world that is governed by these rules. I want to bring the Smash community with me. I wish I knew how.

VII.

I will miss a lot of things about Xanadu Games.

I’ll miss the ballroom, mostly used for majors, but occasionally opened when a weekly got a little too big and more space was needed. It always made you feel like something huge was happening.

I’ll miss watching the horse betting guys in the room over pop off harder than I’ve ever seen from a Smash player. Hungrybox would fit right in, but not even he’s at their level.

I’ll miss the terrible, stunningly overpriced food court out in the horse betting space, which came in clutch at every major I went to.

I’ll miss the times GimR’s dad would show up to big regionals to solo cook quesadillas for attendees on the spot. They were, frankly, way better than the food court.

I’ll miss the cardboard cutout of Chillindude, sitting behind a corner, only visible at the right angle. I hope they find a good place for it.

I’ll miss the strange golden bathroom on the top floor, even though I never actually went there myself.

I’ll miss the many wonderful, weird people I met there. I’ll miss the ones who made such a great impact on me, served as a support system when I needed it the most (whether they knew it or not), and taught me a whole lot about myself.

I was already missing all of those things. I moved away over half a year ago, and I don’t know when I would’ve been able to return. But the loss of that theoretical opportunity hits in a different way.

VIII.

The legacy of Xanadu Games will not die with the venue. That’s ensured by the continued popularity of the VGBootCamp VOD channel, which preserves Xanadu tournament matches going back more than a decade.

The tournaments held here are woven too deep into the fabric of Smash history to ever really go away. Any time someone goes back to a moment from the Glitch or Pound major series, it will be there. You’ll see it pretty much every time you load up a YEET Smash clip compilation, a video essay, or a commentary highlight reel from a caster on the east coast.

Even years from now, it’s likely that someone will stumble across Xanadu content in one form or another, and that’ll be the catalyst that gets them into competitive Smash, just like I did a decade ago.

After every Xanadu event, the recordings of the matches are packaged up and sent out to the stars. They’ll still be flying off into deep space long after the venue is closed.

VOD channels aren’t just archives. They’re messages to the cosmos, yelling into the void, saying “hey, this is who we are and what we’re all about.”

Of course, that metaphor only makes sense because it’s something the human race has actually done.

Photo from NASA.

In 1977, NASA’s Voyager program launched two unmanned spacecraft, simply named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The probes’ stated goal was to fly past the furthest and most remote planets in our solar system, and to capture images that would be transmitted back to Earth, giving us unique views of those planets which we could use to learn more about our solar system.

After that goal was complete, there was no practical way to bring the Voyager probes back to Earth. Instead, they would continue to fly off into the void, unhindered by friction or gravity, sending information back home at regular intervals.

46 years after the initial launch of the Voyager probes, they’re still out there in space, hurtling away from the solar system. Of course, the solar system is much larger than we often imagine it: the probes are not projected to pass the Oort Cloud that marks the border for another twenty thousand years.

It is exceedingly unlikely that the Voyager probes will ever be found by extraterrestrial life, but the researchers working on them prepared something special just in case aliens ever do happen upon them. Each Voyager probe holds a time capsule with various artifacts representing the human race, captured in the form of two identical copies of the Golden Record.

The Golden Record holds a collection of images, sounds, and musical works intended to represent the human race to extraterrestrials who might find it. The images include star maps, diagrams of human anatomy, pictures of natural and man-made wonders on Earth, and even a written message from Jimmy Carter, the sitting United States president at the time the record was made. The sounds are just as varied: ambient nature sounds, animals, cars passing by, a human heartbeat, and a message in Morse code that spells out the Latin phrase “per aspera ad astra”, meaning “through hardships to the stars.”

To me, the most interesting part of the Golden Record is undoubtedly the music. How does one capture the history of human music in only ninety minutes? There was much debate over what pieces to include, and the final selection is varied and eclectic: sure, there’s inevitably an excessive amount of classical music by white men, but that’s eclipsed by the various traditional songs from different cultures included on the list. A pick that has always really stood out to me is “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”, a somber, wordless blues hymn by a mysterious man named Blind Willie Johnson.

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As his name suggests, Johnson was permanently blinded as a child, likely after an outburst by his stepmother resulted in lye water getting splashed in his eyes. As he got older, he took up a career as a street musician and evangelist, eventually getting enough recognition to record his music. Johnson’s recordings sold well, but little of that money ever made it back to him; he was poor his entire life and died before the age of fifty.

Unlike most of Johnson’s music, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” has no words, just the ghostly sounds of a slide guitar and the soulful humming of a man just trying to make sense of a world that has been cruel to him. It’s undeniably desolate and lonely, but every now and then Johnson hits a note that feels surprisingly… hopeful? It’s never for more than a second, though. It always slinks right back into melancholy.

When asked why this song was selected for the Golden Record, Timothy Ferris (an American science writer and one of the record’s producers) explained that “Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.”

To tell the story of the human race without hardship and sorrow would be dishonest. If you want to capture everything we are, you can’t skip things like “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”. In the staggeringly unlikely case that aliens ever do hear Blind Willie Johnson’s music, they will understand just a little bit more about who we are. He lives on through the art he made, even if he may not have lived to see its impact. As long as the Voyager probes fly onwards into the abyss, he will travel with them, too.

When I scroll deep into the archive of a VOD channel like VGBootCamp, I find a lot of players who aren’t part of the scene anymore. Many of them have little to no public presence whatsoever these days. But as long as they’re preserved online, they can’t be fully forgotten.

If you’ve entered a Smash bracket within the last decade or so, your presence was more than likely recorded somehow: if you played on stream, that set might’ve been uploaded to YouTube; if it wasn’t, the Twitch VOD is quite possibly still out there; if you never played on stream, you just might be visible in the back of one of the player cams; even if you didn’t make any contact with the livestream, your results are enshrined on the pages of start.gg, then extracted by websites like smashers.app and recorded there as well; if the event was run on a different website like Challonge, that bracket could still be on the internet anyway. We’ve come a long way from paper brackets and incomplete Smashboards results posts.

The Smash community seldom erases a footprint completely. You wrote a page in this book, too. That matters.

If you haven’t been to your nearest local tournament yet, I really think you should make an effort to do so. I’m not saying you need to become a regular, enter brackets every week, and spend all your money on controllers and venue fees and merch. I’m just asking you to show up once and see how it goes. Maybe you’ll want to stay.

Your local Smash tournament venue will not remain open forever, but you can always be a part of its story. Don’t pass up that opportunity. I’m glad I didn’t.

• Written by AnonymousBadger

Thank you once again for the support. It’s hard to find the time to write stuff like this, and even harder to find a story that drives me to finish an article of this length.

I’ve had bits and pieces of this article written for over a year, originally made to tell other stories that I never quite found the right hook for. It’s sad that it took something like this for them to see the light of day.

I don’t know when I’ll write again. I never do. But I’ll see you again, and I hope you’ll be there with me.

Sources:

• *https://thehumaneleague.org/article/horse-racing-decline#:~:text=But%20it's%20not%20just%20a,2022%2C%20there%20were%20only%2033%2C453.*
• *https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/laurel-race-track-suspends-horse-racing-indefinitely-following-horse-deaths/*
• *https://apnews.com/article/pimlico-horse-racing-track-preakness-0de1c9ca2f7e7e266fb45fc8bee1ed2d*
• *https://marylandmatters.org/2024/05/17/as-national-attention-comes-once-again-to-the-preakness-future-of-laurel-park-is-murky/*
• *https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/*
• *https://www.amazon.com/Murmurs-Earth-Voyager-Interstellar-Record/dp/0345283961*

As always, none of this would be possible without the support of the Ultimate Stats Discord. It doesn’t seem like the invite link is working right now, but if you’re interested in joining the community, just reach out and I’ll try to connect you with someone who can add you.

Thanks for reading, everyone. See you soon.